Hey guys. Remember when I decided to try my hand at a cleaning schedule? I was feeling overwhelmed at how dirty my house had gotten in the wake of Wes, and wanted to try a new system. So I typed up a schedule, used a pretty font, printed it out and slid it into a clear plastic binder sheet that I clipped to a clipboard and kept hand for reference.

I want you to know that I really gave this the old college try. The binder slip was important, and a good call. I used dry erase markers to keep note of the week and what I was and wasn't able to get to. Other than that, I just tried to follow the schedule.

"Tried" being the operative word. It didn't go quite as smoothly as I thought. At first, I liked it. Having one room to get to every day provided a way to channel my focus, so I wasn't stressed if I didn't get to everything. But there were some other issues. First, I made a critical error in implementing this system before I had deep cleaned the house. Instead, I was trying to deep clean each room as I got to it on the schedule. That was really, really hard - it meant a lot of time. And it turns out, I don't have that kind of time. So I would miss rooms, and that sort of led to me being stressed out, especially because it meant the next time I would get to it would be the following week. So a few areas, the ones that got neglected more than once in a row, got...dirty. Which was not the plan. And led to increased levels of stress. Eventually, I dedicated a weekend day to a deep clean, which I think would have helped, but by then I'd sort of thrown the actual schedule out and was just trying to get to rooms whenever I could. And feeling like a failure for not having crossed the long list of things I'd added to my to-do list EVERY DAY. So, all in all, a month in, I am not optimistic that the cleaning schedule is the solution for us.

But I am still looking for a solution. I know that a clean house isn't everyone's first order of priorities. But it is for me - it's just important for my head space. But with two kiddos, a blog, and a yearning desire to be outside all summer, I want to come up with a way to clean it that doesn't soak up all my time.

I consulted the Internets, and apparently, there are all kinds of ways to keep your house clean. One thing I've seen is the idea of a daily speed cleaning. Again, you start with a clean house, because you can't get it seriously clean with only a few minutes a day. Then you devote some time to, essentially, upkeep, every day. This sounds pretty good in theory, and the seeming guru of the philosophy, Ruth from Living Well, Spending Less, says you can have a clean house in just "minutes" a day! Well, she's right...the same way that you can have, I don't know, life insurance for "pennies" a day. It's a lot of pennies. It turns out Ruth spends 45 minutes to an hour each day to keep things sparkling. At first I was aghast - that is, after all 5-7 hours per week - but let's be honest, that's almost certainly less time than I currently spend. I'm just doing it now in a frenzy before I look at the clock and rush to get Lou/do Yoga/run to the doctor. Still, in any given day it sounds like it could be formidable. And I don't want to fall down a rabbit hole where I'm crazy cleaning one space and the others get neglected, or I look up and the whole day is gone.

Enter the timer. I picked this little guy up a couple weeks ago to get Louisa motivated in her morning routine. (That's working, by the way, which we'll chat about at some point). But I'm going to put it to use to motivate myself, too. I've assigned each room an amount of time for sprucing in the morning, and I'm going to stick to it. So whatever I don't get done, I'll have to leave for the following day. This timed routine doesn't include meal cleanup, including the post-dinner mess - I just have to resign myself to that extra time. But it does include whatever dishes are in the sink, and sort of aims to take the house where it is at any given point (once it's deep cleaned). I included a list of things I could get done in each chunk of time, which is a little silly - can't I just look around and see what needs to get done? But what I'm hoping is that, following the frequency/probability theory, it won't all get done every day, but it will all get done often enough that it'll work out. So some days the whole 20 minutes in the kitchen will be taken up by dishes, counters and floors, but some days there will be time to do the fridge. Does that make sense? And I'm thinking that having the list of possible tasks might be helpful to jog my memory/motivation. But, once again for the kids in the back: In no way do I think I'll get everything on each list done in the time allotted. This is about doing as much as I can in the time allotted.

As far as the time goes - how much to allot to each room - I was a little in the dark. But I have noticed when using the timer for Lou that a few minutes is actually a lot longer than you might think. And I wanted to keep total time to under an hour. So, I cam up with a 50 minute schedule. In an ideal world, a lot of this would be done immediately upon waking so I'd have a gorgeous, clean house to enjoy throughout the day, and so that I wouldn't stress about getting things done. We'll see how it works out.

What do you think? Is it nuts to assign time every single day? I feel more optimistic about this set up for us because I'm already doing so much of it. I make our beds, for example, and tend to sort of tidy up all day long. So I feel like I'll actually be limiting my time and containing the madness. But I was optimistic about the cleaning schedule, too, and that didn't work that well for our family. In any event, this is real time reporting on the pluses and minuses of this particular setup! I'll try it for a month and get back to y'all. And then we'll try something different!